Design Thinking

Interaction Design Encyclopaedia

 

The area of Interaction Design is relatively new, although its roots can be found in established professional and academic domains, such as Design and Computation or Social Science. Interaction-Design.org is an educational resource that makes knowledge in Interaction Design and related fields available to a wider audience. A new project is the Interaction Design Encyclopaedia, which follows the more traditional example of peer-reviewed articles but brings in audio-visual material as support. 

For example, the entry on Visual representation that is featured today (February 2nd, 2011) beautifully illustrates why there is such a variety of representation styles and what they are good for. 

All inclusive: the russians used a pencil

There is a wonderful story of 2 designers who had an idea of a product, and through social media and clever production and marketing strategies got it on the market within 5 months. It is a very encouraging story, but for me the key is understanding the power of social media in designing. 

If you want to know more read on.

BBC - Global business

"Peter Day hears from Tim Brown of Ideo, in California, and Roger Martin in Canada, on how design is so much more than it used to be."
Listen here

I think we could use this in the global block or generally as a resource... It first goes into problems of mass production, then Tim highlights the importance of broad education (contra specialization) - everyone can think designerly in any domain. He is explaining a bit about process, convergence and divergence, ... importance of storytelling for designer.

and Roger Martin talks about integrative thinking...

Designing Chairs

Habitat designer Tom Dixon appeared on BBC Radio 4's The Today Programme today (doh!) in advance of the Milan Furniture Fair, which starts tomorrow.  In a 4 minute clip he talked to Evan Davies about the design of chairs, and how chairs might be designed in the future.

Tom Dixon Talks About Designing Chairs

Design in the Media

There were three articles on Design and Design Education in the Observer this weekend.  

Two featured James Dyson bemoaning the fact that people don't make anything anymore, and how UK PLC could benefit from (Engineering) Designers.  He's just given £5 million to the RCA to help them with a new building (and, one presumes, the promotion of his ideas). 

Design Guru's £5 Million bid to find new talent

Dyson: Let Engineers make Britain great again

The other article featured a design idea - speed bumps that harness energy.  I'd love to know whether this is something real or not, or just a drawing board exercise, but it does display Design Thinking I think, and might be an example to refer to on the course.

Speed bumps to get new role as source of green energy

Noticing the world around us.

On my search for inspiration for rewriting the design observation element, I found this article. I once met Steve Portigal in Hong Kong, he might be a good person to interview. In the article he writes:

"This process of noticing once and then noticing again is how you start finding patterns and uncovering themes. For example, in the throbbing Shibuya skyline we noticed enormous video billboards for a new album by Ayumi Hamasaki (who we’d obviously never heard of). Then we saw trucks driving through the streets with billboards on the side promoting the same album. A few days later we passed the stadium and there was a huge crowd going to see her in concert. And along the street were dozens of vans that Ayumi Hamasaki fans had customized with pictures of her face. It’s not that we wouldn’t have walked past all these things, but that the activity of noticing the first one, and documenting it, meant that I was ready to notice and document the second, and beyond. So when we saw the concert crowd and the vans, we were able to connect it: “Oh, this is the performer that we’ve been seeing all the ads for.” This process of trying to figure out what’s going on in a new place, of finding and understanding patterns and themes, is exactly what we do in our user research."

I was thinking of an activity that draws on this repetition of noticing. You condition yourself to notice again because you became interested but your interest for knowing was not entirely satisfied the first time. He also wrote, noticing is a conversation with the world around us, and our inner ‘ego’. I don't want this skill to be an outburst of developing a self-concept but truth is, in order to understand others we have to understand us (our self) first.

They mention 2 activities to train your noticing-skills. One technique is reporting about what you have experienced between a certain time frame (we do this already in compendium 1) and the other is uploading a daily picture to flickr with annotation or making a blog entry. This reminded me somehow of Peter’s ‘What is design’ article. Maybe we can draw connections between quite and designer design and noticing for design observation.

Jonathan Ive on Design Ideas

On Yesterday's 'Stephen Fry in America' (BBC1) was a short interview with the head designer at Apple, Jonathan Ive - who studied Industrial Design at Northumbria University.  It was a nice quote about the fragility of ideas. The programme is viewable for the next seven days on iPlayer, and I've transcribed it here:

Fry: It could be said that the two most influential Britons of the last 20 years could be Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the world wide web and [Jonathan Ive] who's given us the iPod and all the train of Apple products, yet you both choose to live and work in America, I wonder if that says something about Britain or more importantly about America?

Ive: I think there's just a conspicuous lack of cynicism and scepticism and ideas are so fragile aren't they, it's so easy to sort of miss an idea, because they can be so quiet, or to snuff an idea out.  I think that the sense of the inquisitiveness and the willingness to try is so important for design, for developing those tentative, fragile ideas into a real product.

Design of the Street

I think I posted a couple of entries a while ago about traffic designers. This article brings it all together nicely; how the various types of decisions made about what goes into the street influence how we walk. Apparently Kensington High Street has been 'redesigned' reflecting recent theory on pedestrian traffic - perhaps a good case study to follow up.

Download Kerb Your Enthusiasm (pdf)

Sex and the City

Here's a thought-provoking article from The Guardian, about how urban environments are largely designed by men for men. Not any more apparently...

Read the Article

And an article from The Observer about how teachers want to be more involved in the design of their schools.

Read the Article

Search Engine and interesting blog

I heard about a new search engine today, made by exGoogle people, it is called cuil and my experiments with it have found it really useful. It takes images from pages too which gives it a different feel to any other engine. One of the things I found using it was the blog below from someone at the Institute of Design in Chicago which is interesting. Also discovered a video networking site where you can download the videos. The one below looked good but the sound quality was very patchy on my computer.

http://www.cuil.com

http://dori3.typepad.com/my_weblog/design_education/index.html

http://vimeo.com/1269848